Paradoxically, Kweli sought mainstream airplay in those years, following the success of his Ye-produced single “Get By” with The Beautiful Struggle, a collection of sleek R&B collaborations that drew accusations of selling out. “If skills sold,” Jay-Z rapped on The Black Album’s “Moment of Clarity,” “truth be told, I’d probably be lyrically Talib Kweli.”īlack Star’s No Fear of Time reminds us exactly how many years have passed since their first album, and how appreciable but truly unrepeatable that 1998 energy is now. Both rappers guested on Ye’s The College Dropout in the Netflix docuseries Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy we learned that Ye really wanted to produce for Black Star. Associating with the indie-rap and neo-soul pioneers in the Soulquarians collective yielded space on classics like Common’s Like Water for Chocolate and the Roots’ Things Fall Apart and Phrenology. The duo’s progressive, pro-Black politics and fiercely independent spirit appealed to a surprisingly wide spectrum of admirers. They reunited now and then - on the booming “Know That” from Bey’s 1999 debut Black on Both Sides, on the remix for “Get By” from Kweli’s 2002 debut Quality, at Dave Chappelle’s Block Party in 2004, on the joyous “History” from Bey’s 2009 album The Ecstatic - while Black Star was remembered as an indie-rap classic. As Bey articulated in “Thieves in the Night,” our “synthesized surface conceals the interior America: land of opportunity, mirages, and camouflages.”Īfter that, they appeared to go their separate ways. They were trying to square a grisly past with a glossy present. “Every day, somebody asks me where all the real MCs is at,” Kweli announced at the top of “Hater Players.” “They underground.” Even the group’s name is a provocation of a sort, a reference to Jamaican author and activist Marcus Garvey’s ill-fated plan for ferrying Black Americans back to Africa. Black Star pushed back against the devaluing of Black art and Black life. The distaste for sleek commercial rap and remakes of ’70s disco and soul hits was steady enough to drive some listeners out in search of a different sound and musical ethos.īey and Kweli tied all the threads together, framing record-industry misdealings in rap as part of wider mistreatment of Black youth, just another manifestation of our nation’s original sin. In music it was the height of the jiggy era, smack in the middle of the long trail of singles supporting No Way Out and Harlem World, where Puff and Mase made platinum hits out of healthy samples of existing platinum hits.
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The news was full of developments like the brutal police attack on Haitian American security guard Abner Louima in New York City and the push to appeal the death sentence handed to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the journalist and activist charged with capital murder for the shooting death of a Philadelphia police officer. The record arrived at a precarious moment in the late ’90s, amid difficult discussions about oppression. Then the duo went a step further, and in 1998 dropped an album.
Working alongside the producer DJ Hi-Tek and Rawkus Records, an upstart indie imprint founded by friends at Brown University, Bey and Kweli crafted exciting cuts like “Fortified Live,” “Universal Magnetic,” and “2000 Seasons” - all soon to be highlights from Soundbombing I, the landmark 1997 compilation collecting early works from Bey, Kweli, and Company Flow, and great performances from legendary oddballs like Kool Keith, Sir Menelik, and R.A. By 1997, they’d started making music together. The two Brooklyn rappers became fast friends. Bey, a former child actor, was juggling dueling aspirations for careers in rapping and acting he started a group called Urban Thermo Dynamics with his brother and sister, starred on the short-lived genre experiment The Cosby Mysteries, and logged respectable guest features on records by groups like De La Soul. Kweli, the son of college professors, approached hip-hop as an NYU theater student. Kweli and Bey, born Dante Smith, got to know each other in the early ’90s, freestyling in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park and appearing at the same local spoken-word events. But something else happened: Every time the duo linked up after that, fans thirsted anew for a sequel. They hoped it would build the foundation for their future solo releases.
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Luring you in with prodigious mic skills, they sent you away with homework, referencing seminal books, films, albums, and thinkers listeners could track down in their free time. Their first album, 1998’s Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, introduced Yasiin Bey (then known as Mos Def) and Talib Kweli as young philosophers and budding radicals. The fact that it exists - No Fear of Time, out now - is incredible.
We’ve been waiting on a second Black Star album since the Clinton administration.
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